


something every minute

by TolkienGirl



Category: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith, Captain America (Movies)
Genre: American History, Artist Steve Rogers, Brooklyn, Canon-Compliant, Childhood Illnesses, Drawing, Gen, Light Crossover, Poverty, Stock Market Crash of 1929, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:40:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23297152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: “Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life." - A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Relationships: Francie Nolan & Miss Bernstone, James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, Sarah Rogers & Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Miss Bernstone
Kudos: 16





	something every minute

_“She spoke softly in a clear singing voice. Her hands were beautiful and quick with a bit of chalk or a stick of charcoal. There was magic in the way her wrist turned when she held a crayon. One wrist twist and there was an apple. Two more twists and there was a child’s sweet hand holding the apple. On a rainy day, she wouldn’t give a lesson. She’d take a block of paper and a stick of charcoal and sketch the poorest, meanest kid in the room. And when the picture was finished, you didn’t see the dirt or the meanness; you saw the glory of innocence and the poignancy of a baby growing up too soon. Oh, Miss Bernstone was grand.”_

\- Betty Smith, _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn_

Steven Grant Rogers grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn. Of course, _grew up_ was a turn of phrase that had people snickering behind their hands, because he didn’t grow much above five feet. He was skinny, too, hovering around a hundred pounds much as a blue-bottle fly hovers, dying on any old windowsill.

When he was eleven, _he_ almost died, and that was the seventh close call he’d had in his life.

His mother worried it would be influenza, in the end. He’d been born in the worst year of all, 1918, but his survival _then_ hadn’t given her much hope for him. Joseph Rogers had taken a bullet in 1917 and lived, but the mustard gas came home with him, ruining his lungs. His own war kept him from meeting the tiny, squalling son that he and his wife should have raised up together.

Sarah Rogers, a young nurse with a now-useless red cross on her cap, could never trust a second chance again.

Her boy didn’t catch influenza that year. Instead, he had scarlet fever in the dog-days of summer, just after the birthday he shared each year with the nation. Sarah despaired of leaving him and stayed in the dark little flat as many hours a day as she could, risking her coveted position at the hospital.

There wasn’t enough money for food _and_ medicine. If it weren’t for the hampers of Long Island vegetables and floury rye breads that appeared mysteriously on the doorstep, twice a week for two weeks, they might both have starved.

Instead, Sarah made soup in early August, sweating at every pore, and it did the boy some good.

The last hamper had a note pinned to it. That was how they met the Barnes family.

Flatbush was full of working men and women in 1929, when Steve was eleven and beating Death in a bare-knuckle round. The Crash was coming in less than two months.

Steven-Grant-Rogers. Five syllables were too many for a snippet of a boy, so almost everyone called him Steve. The Barnes boy, who had a similarly lengthy moniker but too much debonair swagger to go by anything but _Bucky_ , called him _Steve_ - _o_. His mother called him by his full Christian name.

So did Miss Bernstone.

Miss Bernstone was the visiting teacher who had lit a spark under Francie Nolan. Francie Nolan had been living and dreaming in Williamsburg not so many years before, but there was a war in between her life and Steve’s, and that war changed Brooklyn.

Sure, you could still get a sour pickle or a steaming paper twist of roasted chickpeas from the Jewish merchants. Kids hauled scrap hither and yon like they always had, but seventeen years made more than a lick of difference between two eleven-year-olds.

It hadn’t made so much difference to Miss Bernstone.

Miss Bernstone had been a soft and gracious twenty-nine when Francie was a girl, and now she was nearly fifty. But she still wore dresses that she “bought out” in forest-soft shades, and she still made magic with a stubbed crayon or a scrap of charcoal.

Because he was a child, and a poor child at that, the Crash didn’t make much difference to Steve. Nurses would always be needed—Sarah had kept her place at the hospital. Also, between her nurse’s wage and Joseph’s measly Army pension, they no savings to speak of. No money in the bank meant no money to lose. The unrest in the streets was felt, but Steve was used to dodging blows (or taking them). Accordingly, he always remembered ’29 as the year he learned to draw.

School had been an uncertain venture before, but now he had Bucky to look after him. Bucky was only twelve, but he was sought-after for baseball games in the yard. Some said the Brooklyn Bums would scout him before he turned eighteen. And oh, wouldn’t that be grand!

Steve didn’t care for baseball, and so that pang of insufficiency simply hadn’t rung his bell yet. He combed his hair to the same side as Bucky did (though it wouldn’t stay down) and they sketched fantastical scenes together when it rained on Saturday.

That Barnes boy would charm the shine off a penny, people said. Miss Bernstone smiled at him, because he was friendly and could doodle caricatures with mischievous skill, but her real interest was in Steve.

Steve, she said, had _talent_.

Those were golden days, when the world was falling down. He’d be ashamed later of his ignorance, but it had been one of a child’s few privileges.

(Had he seen the same innocence in another boy, in 1945 or 2012 or 2024, he wouldn’t have begrudged him a bit of it.)

Miss Bernstone sometimes required paper, and she commissioned Steve to purchase it.

Steve didn’t know anything about Paris. He wouldn’t, until he was somebody else. At any rate, he would never see the book-linings drying in clothes-pinned lines between the streets they called _rues_. The lines formed a sort of screen to shield and venerate the square mountain-angles of Notre Dame. The linings, rich with oil-slick swirls of paint in indigo, ruby, and jade, were very different from the papers sold in Brooklyn.

In Brooklyn, the stalls mostly offered brown butcher-paper, with thinner stuffs tucked in glass-paned cabinets, available only if you showed the spectacled stall-keeper your money and said _a dozen sheets of drawing paper for ___ school_.

Steve always did just that, but the stall-keeper didn’t like him. There was too much verve poking out of the boy. He had spirit, and the mean minds of mankind will always object to large souls housed in small bodies.

On the paper Steve procured (ear still stinging from a cuff he’d received for the inexplicable sin of _standing too close_ ), Miss Bernstone made a flowering tree.

Steve tried to draw a lion, rampant.

He didn’t get very far, but the teeth and claws had a curve of promise.

Miss Bernstone was buried in Green-Wood cemetery. Steve never visited. Not out of indifference; she died in 1962. He was dead, then, too, and he never had time to find her when he was alive again.

The things that stayed with Steve, beyond the verve and the outsized soul, were: how to take a punch (it took some learning), how to flavor soup with the root-end of an onion, how to hold a pencil, and the way to use a soft _tortillon_ of rolled paper to shade black into white.

Art and morality weren’t the same thing. Morality required hard lines of what you would or wouldn’t do. Stars-and-stripes of no turning back, heavy with exhausted duty.

He liked to think for himself anyway, when he could.

He liked to draw while he did it.


End file.
